Welcome to Not Me! Monday (which also includes Not My Child! Monday)! This blog carnival was created by MckMama. You can head over to her blog to read what she and everyone else have not been doing this week.

I am very thankful that my body has been blessed with great health these last couple of years. Apparently, after raising three children through the preschool years, I’ve finally built up enough immunity to get through the fourth one’s preschool years relatively unscathed. What’s even better is that most of time, my body very considerately times its illnesses to commence on Friday or Saturday. This means I actually get to take a sick day and disappear, semi-unconscious, under the covers while care of the kids and dog rests in the capable hands of my husband.

This past Saturday, I woke up unusually early with a telltale ache in the pit of my stomach. After tossing and turning for a couple of hours, getting up, laying down, and even trying a bite to eat, I reluctantly accepted that I had a bona fide bug of some sort. I told the kids I wasn’t feeling well and that I was going to lay on the couch till their Daddy returned from the men’s Bible study he was attending. At that point, someone with enough energy to open a breakfast bar would be able to tend to their needs and I could disappear for what ended up being several hours.

I thought they were being incredibly good, as I laid on the couch trying to keep the puppy from climbing up next to me.

They were definitely not doing this:

They did not decide to remove every single book from their bookshelves and stack them according to who liked it best, until the piles started to sway and tip. They did not deem the winner to be the one whose pile of books tipped farthest soonest, and they did not revel in the mess created when all the stacks toppled, spilling books from stem to stern.

They also did not come to me as I was curled up in a fetal position on our couch, and tell me they had made a huge mess with books and none of them were on the bookshelves anymore.

(Actually, to be completely real here, I didn’t mind this activity much at all. It makes a spectacular photo, which my kind husband, who is starting to understand my love of photos for Not Me! Mondays, took on his own initiative and brought to me! I was so thankful that they weren’t screaming at each other, painting the bathroom with Vaseline, or drawing pictures with chapstick on the carpet, none of which has ever happened in our house before…)